I have a Magic Murder Bag:
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| Das ist mien Magic Murder Bag |
Inside that Magic Murder Bag, I have a Magic Murder Book:
 |
| Ich habe ein Magic Murder Book |
Ch. 1
The New World Order
The balance of power, which most Americans disdained, in fact assured American security as long as it functioned as it was designed; and that is was its breakdown that drew America into international politics. (p. 20)
By definition, a balance-of-power arrangement cannot satisfy every member of the international system completely. (p. 21)
Empires have no need for a balance of power. (p. 21)
Ch. 2
The Hinge: Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson
It is above all to the drumbeat of Wilsonian idealism that American foreign policy has marched. (p. 30)
In [Teddy] Roosevelt's view, the meek inherited the earth only if they were strong. (p. 40)
Statesmen, even warriors, focus on the world in which they live; to prophets, the "real" world is the one they want to bring into being. (p. 47)
Ch. 3
From Universality to Equilibrium
In Western Europe, the potential and, from time to time, actual conflict between pope and emperor established the conditions for eventual constitutionalism and the separation of powers which are the basis of modern democracy. (p. 57)
Upon learning of Cardinal Richelieu's death, Pope Urban VIII is alleged to have said, "If there is a God, the Cardinal de Richelieu will have much to answer for. If not... well, he had a successful life." (p. 58)
"Man is immortal, his salvation in hereafter," he [Richelieu] once said. "The state has no immortality, its salvation is now or never." (p. 61)
"In matters of state," wrote Richelieu in his Political Testament, "he who has the power often has the right, and he who is weak can only with difficulty keep from being wrong in the opinion of the majority of the world"--a maxim rarely contradicted in the intervening centuries. (p. 65)
But the gods often punish man by fulfilling his wishes too completely. (p. 66)
Power without legitimacy tempts tests of strength; legitimacy without power tempts empty posturing. (p. 77)
Ch. 4
The Concert of Europe:
Great Britain, Austria, and Russia
Great Britain, Austria, and Russia
The weakness of collective security is that interests are rarely uniform and that security is rarely seamless. (p. 90)
Yet any pragmatic policy--indeed, especially a pragmatic policy--must be based on some fixed principle in order to prevent tactical skill from dissipating into a random thrashing about. (p. 98)
Thus, Palmerston approvingly quoted Canning's own pragmatic adage: "That those who have checked improvement because it is innovation, will one day or other be compelled to accept innovation when it has ceased to be improvement." (p. 101)
Ch. 5
Two Revolutionaries: Napoleon III and Bismark
A country that seeks great changes and lacks the willingness to run great risks dooms itself to futility. (p. 108)
For leaders unable to choose among their alternatives, circumspection becomes and alibi for inaction. (p. 113)
Ch. 6
Realpolitik Turns on Itself
The paradox of Russian history lies in the continuing ambivalence between messianic drive and a pervasive sense of insecurity. (p. 143)
Upon learning that he [Benjamin Disraeli] would be named Prime Minister in 1868, he exulted "Hurray! Hurray! I've climbed to the top of the greasy pole!" (p. 150)
"Where an enormous standing army is maintained, it is absolutely necessary to find employment for it... When a system of conquest sets in, as in Central Asia, one acquisition of territory leads to another, and the difficulty is where to stop." -Lord Augustus Loftus (p. 152)
Ch. 7
A Political Doomsday Machine:
European Diplomacy Before the First World War
European Diplomacy Before the First World War
At the beginning of the twentieth century, wars could still be started with a touch of frivolity. Indeed, some European thinkers held that periodic bloodletting was cathartic, a naïve hypothesis that was brutally punctured by the First World War. (p. 168)
There are no diplomatic shortcuts to domination; the only route that leads to it is war. (p. 172)
Each time a collision was avoided, the collective confidence in the game's ultimate safety was strengthened, causing everyone to forget that a single failure would produce irrevocable catastrophe. (p. 196)
Ch. 8
Into the Vortex: The Military Doomsday Machine
World War I started not because countries broke their treaties, but because they fulfilled them to the letter. (p. 211)
"Woe to the leader whose arguments at the end of a war are not as plausible as they were at the beginning." -Otto von Bismark (p. 217)
Ch. 9
The New Face of Diplomacy:
Wilson and the Treaty of Versailles
Wilson and the Treaty of Versailles
The aftermath of World War I was social upheaval, ideological conflict, and another world war. (p 221)
In America's view, it was not self-determination which caused wars but the lack of it; not the absence of a balance of power that produced instability but the pursuit of it. (p. 222)
Like Israel in the modern period, France masked its vulnerability with prickliness, and incipient panic with intransigence. And, like Israel in the modern period, it stood in constant danger of isolation. (p. 228)
In essence, Wilson's ideas translated into institutions tantamount to world government, which the American people were even less prepared to accept than a global police force. (p. 234)
The price for conducting foreign policy on the basis of abstract principles is the impossibility of distinguishing among individual cases. (p. 244)
Ch. 10
The Dilemmas of the Victors
Traditional alliances were directed against specific threats and defined precise obligations for specific groups of countries linked by shared national interests or mutual security concerns. Collective security defines no particular threat, guarantees no individual nation, and discriminates against none. (p. 247)
It is in the nature of prophets to redouble their efforts, not to abandon them, in the face of a recalcitrant reality. (p. 248)
Ch 11
Stresemann and the
Re-emergence of the Vanquished
Re-emergence of the Vanquished
That the man [Stresemann] who had called the Treaty of Versailles "the greatest swindle in history" should initiate a policy of fulfillment seems a strange turn of events only to those who believe that Realpolitik cannot teach the benefits of moderation. (p. 271)
A mechanism was devised for doing nothing at all. It took the form of a fact-finding mission--the standard device for diplomats signaling that inaction in the desired outcome. (p 287)
Ch. 12
The essence of demagoguery resides in the ability to distill emotion and frustration into a single moment. (p. 289)
Statesmen always face the dilemma that, when their scope for action is greatest, they have a minimum of knowledge. (p. 294)
Foreign policy builds on quicksand when it disregards actual power relationships and relies on prophesies of another's intentions. (p. 301)
What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify. (p. 303)
Ch 13.
Stalin's Bazaar
If ideology necessarily determined foreign policy, Hitler and Stalin would never have joined hands any more than Richelieu and the Sultan of Turkey would have three centuries earlier. (p. 332)
Ch. 15
All great leaders walk alone. (p. 370)
Ch. 16
When an American general at the Potsdam Conference tried to flatter Stalin by observing how gratifying it had been to see Russian armies in Berlin, Stalin replied tartly, "Tsar Alexander I reached Paris." (p. 398)
Ch. 17
The Beginning of the Cold War
Like Moses, Franklin Delano Roosevelt saw the Promised Land, but was not given to him to reach it. (p. 423)
"If the president knows what he wants, no bureaucrat can stop him. A president has to know when to stop taking advice." -Harry S. Truman (p. 425)
"We completely defeated our enemies and made them surrender," he [Truman] remarked. "And then we helped them to recover, to become democratic, and to rejoin the community of nations. Only America could have done that." (p. 425)
At one point, Davies slipped a note to Truman which said: "I think Stalin's feelings are hurt, please be nice to him." (p. 433)
Ch. 18
The Success and the Pain of Containment
Never before had a Great Power expressed objectives quite so demanding of it's own resources without any expectation of reciprocity other than the dissemination of its national values. (p. 463)
Great enterprises are often driven by a touch of naïveté. (p. 470)
Tormenting itself in its traditional quest for moral perfection, America would emerge, after more than a generation of struggle, lacerated by its exertions and controversies, yet having achieved almost everything it had set out to do. (p. 472)
Ch. 19
The Dilemma of Containment: The Korean War
America's innocence was but the reverse side of an extraordinary capacity for dedication. (p. 491)
Ch. 20
Adenauer replied in his lapidary manner: "Never confuse energy with strength." (p. 503)
Ch. 21
Leapfrogging Containment: The Suez Crisis
For an alliance to be effective, it must reflect some sense of common purpose, a perception of common danger, and the capacity to pool strengths. (p. 527)
It takes perseverance to find a policy which combines the disadvantages of every course of action, or to construct a coalition that weakens every partner simultaneously. Great Britain, France, and Israel managed just that feat. (p. 541)
Ch. 22
Hungary: Upheaval in the Empire
Ultimately, Soviet policy came up against the same problem that had confounded Russia earlier in its history: Eastern Europe, communized to enhance the security of the Soviet state, consumed resources and high-level attention to the point of becoming more of a burden than a strategic prize. (p. 552)
Principle permits no ambiguity and no gradations. (p. 566)
Ch. 23
Khrushchev's Ultimatum: The Berlin Crisis 1958-63
Credibility in the face of Armageddon implied a hair-trigger reaction to challenges and a demonstration of recklessness so beyond normal calculation that no aggressor would ever dare to test it. (p. 574)
It was not a pretty game, but raison d'état teaches hard lessons. (p. 576)
The most frequently cited benefit was what the Soviet leader was presumed to be learning about his hosts, which reflected the standard American belief that conflicts among nations are caused by misunderstanding rather than by clashing interests, and that no one could ever come, see, and leave America and still be hostile to its ways. (p. 581)
Ch. 24
Chamberlain's reference in 1938 to Czechoslovakia as a small, faraway country of which Britons knew little was an accurate description of the detachment with which a country that had spent a century and a half fighting colonial wars on the other side of the world viewed crises in Europe several hundred miles away. (p. 596)
The British have never shared the American view of the perfectibility of man, and have not been given to proclaiming moral absolutes. (p. 597)
The interaction of the American leadership's personal humility and historical arrogance, and de Gaulle's personal arrogance, and de Gaulle's personal arrogance and historical humility, defined the psychological gulf between America and France. (p. 603)
The Nuclear Age turned strategy into deterrence, and deterrence into an esoteric intellectual exercise. (p. 608)
For one of the most difficult lessons America has yet to learn is that nations cooperate for long periods only when the share common political goals, and that American policy must focus on these goals rather than on the mechanisms used to reach them. (p. 616)
Ch. 25
Vietnam: Entry into the Morass;
Truman and Eisenhower
Truman and Eisenhower
It all began with the best of intentions. (p. 620)
In the crucible of Vietnam, American exceptionalism turned on itself. (p. 621)
American's initial commitment to Indochina in 1950 established the pattern for its future involvement: large enough to get America entangled, not significant enough to prove decisive. (p. 626)
The basic equation of guerrilla war is simple as it is difficult to execute: the guerrilla army wins as long as it can keep from losing; the conventional army is bound to lose unless it wins decisively. (p. 629)
Leaders of independence struggles tend to be heroes, and heroes do not generally make comfortable companions. (p. 638)
Ch. 26
As in a classical tragedy in which the hero is led step by imperceptible step to his destiny by seemingly random events, the Kennedy Administration's entry into Vietnam was by way of a crisis from which is predecessors had been spared--the future of Laos. (p. 645)
Vice presidential overseas missions are generally designed to stake American prestige, or to supply credibility for decisions that have already been made. (p. 649)
America was not prepared to grasp the nettle that the real choice was total commitment or withdrawal, and that the most dangerous course was a gradual escalation. (p. 652)
And history teaches this iron law of revolutions: the more extensive the eradication of existing authority, the more its successors must rely on naked power to establish themselves. (p. 655)
In the cauldron of Vietnam, America was to learn that there are limits to even the most sacrosanct beliefs, and was forced to come to terms with the gap which can arise between power and principle. (p. 658)
A nation should not send half a million of its young to a distant continent or stake its international standing and domestic cohesion unless its leaders can describe their political goals and offer a realistic strategy for achieving them. (p. 659)
Moral relativism was unacceptable to a nation brought up on faith in the absolute distinction between good and evil. (p. 667)
Ch. 27
Vietnam: The Extrication; Nixon
As sensitive and subtle as Nixon was in the conduct of diplomacy, he was also a street fighter when it came to domestic politics, relying on methods he never ceased to believe had been the stock-in-trade of many of his predecessors. (p. 677)
Presidents, however, cannot abandon a task because it proves more difficult than they had expected. (p 679)
In Washington, ideas do not sell themselves. (p. 683)
The test of a society is whether it can submerge its differences in the pursuit of common objectives, and whether it can keep in mind that societies thrive on their reconciliations, not on their conflicts. America failed that test in Indochina. (p. 694)
Perhaps the most serious, and surely the most hurtful, domino which fells as a result of the Vietnam War was the cohesion of American society. (p. 699)
To have wanted to prevent the communist takeover of a new nation may have been naïve, but it ought not to have led to the assault on America's core values which became such a central part of the national debate. (p. 699)
Thwarted in these aspirations, America search its soul and turned on itself. Surely no other society would have had comparable confidence it its ultimate cohesiveness to thus rip itself apart, certain that it could put itself together again. No other people would have been so cavalier about risking breakdown in order to spark renewal. (p. 701)
Ch. 28
Foreign Policy as Geopolitics:
Nixon's Triangular Diplomacy
Nixon's Triangular Diplomacy
The assurance that America would keep its commitments was boilerplate; like professions of chastity, it has limited plausibility since its abandonment is unlikely to be announced before the event. (p. 708)
Throughout the Cold War, much of the domestic debate over containment had been conducted in classically American categories that excluded geopolitics, with one group seeing foreign policy as a subdivision of theology and it's opponents viewing foreign policy as a subdivision of psychiatry. (p. 709)
One of the principal tasks of statesmanship is to understand which subjects are truly related and can be used to reinforce each other. (p 717)
The Chinese chargé, entirely without instructions for the contingency of being approached by an American diplomat, at first ran away. (p. 726)
I could not have encountered a group of interlocutors more receptive to Nixon's style of diplomacy than the Chinese leaders. (p. 726)
Ch. 29
Detente and Its Discontents
America paid for its self-flagellation with a delay of nearly a decade in finally confronting its geopolitical necessities. (p. 752)
Ch. 30
The End of the Cold War: Reagan and Gorbachev
The Cold War had begun at a time when America was expecting an era of peace. And the Cold War ended at a moment when America was girding itself for a new era of protracted conflict. (p. 762)
No world power [USSR] had ever disintegrated so totally or so rapidly without losing a war. (p. 763)
Reagan knew next to no history, and the little he did know he tailored to support his firmly held preconceptions. He treated biblical references to Armageddon as operation predictions. Many of the historical anecdotes he was so fond of recounting had no basis in fact, as facts are generally understood. (p. 764)
Reagan might well have had only a few basic ideas, but there also happened to be the core foreign policy issues of his period, which demonstrates that a sense of direction and having the strength of one's convictions are the key ingredients of leadership. (p. 765)
In the American system of government, in which the president is the only nationally elected official, coherence in foreign policy emerges--if at all--from presidential pronouncements. (p. 765)
The theory of Mutual Assured Destruction marked a deliberate flight from rationality in strategic theory by basing defense on the threat of suicide. (p. 779)
Posterity is always more given to assigning the blame for failure to individuals than to circumstances. (p. 791)
Statesmen need luck as much as they need good judgement. And fortune simply would not smile on Mikhail Gorbachev. (p. 792)
His [Gorbachev] spokesman, Gerasimov, joked to the press that Moscow had adopted the "Sinatra Doctrine" in Eastern Europe. "You know the Frank Sinatra song, 'I Did It My Way'? Hungary and Poland are doing it their way." (p. 794)
Revolutions consume their children because revolutionaries rarely understand that, after a certain point of social disintegration, there are no longer any fixed Archimedean points from which to exert leverage. (p. 795)
By shifting his base from the Communist Party to the governmental side of the Soviet system, Gorbachev had entrusted his revolution to an army of clerks. (p. 797)
Exceptionalism inspired America's foreign policy and gave the United States the fortitude to prevail in the Cold War. But it will require far more subtle applications in the multipolar world of the twenty-first century. American will finally have to face the challenge it has been able to avoid through most of its history: whether its traditional perception of itself as either strictly beacon or crusader still defines its choices or limits them; whether, in short, it must at last develop some definition of its national interest. (p. 803)
Ch. 31
The New World Order Reconsidered
Whenever the entities constituting the international system change their character, a period of turmoil inevitably follows. (p. 806)
As the twenty-first century approaches, vast global forces are at work that, over the course of time, will render the United States less exceptional. (p. 809)
The United States will face economic competition of a kind it never experienced during the Cold War. (p 809)
America will be the greatest and most powerful nation, but a nation with peers; the primus inter pares but nonetheless a nation like others. (p. 809)
In the twenty-first century, America, like other nations, must learn to navigate between necessity and choice, between the immutable constants of international relations and the elements subject to the discretion of statesmen. (p. 812)
On the territory of the former Soviet Union, not every anticommunist is a democrat, and not every democrat is opposed to Russian imperialism. (p. 815)
And without Europe, America could turn, psychologically as well as geographically and geopolitically, into an island off the shores of Eurasia. (p. 822)
Wilsonianism has few disciples in Asia. (p. 826)
With respect to Europe, America shares a community of values but has not yet been able to devise a common policy or adequate institutions for the post-Cold War period; with respect to Asia, it is possible for America to define a desirable overall strategy, but not a community of values. (p. 831)
The American refusal to be bound by history and the insistence on the perpetual possibility for renewal confer a great dignity, even beauty, on the American way of life. (p. 833)
In traveling along the road to world order for the third time in the modern era, American idealism remains as essential as ever, perhaps even more so. But in the new world order, its role will be to provide the faith to sustain America through all the ambiguities of choice in an imperfect world. (p. 836)
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